A virtual reality study on Santa Maria Crater on Mars

Author

Jue Wang ; Bennett, Keith J.

fYear

2013

fDate

18-20 March 2013

Firstpage

105

Lastpage

106

Abstract

This poster presents a study of virtual reality on selected sites on Mars. A Virtual Astronaut (VA) is created as an interactive virtual 3D environment for the planetary science community to support the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. A prototype study was conducted based on orbital and Opportunity rover data covering Santa Maria Crater in Meridiani Planum. The prototype VA provides dynamic visual representations of the imaging, compositional, and mineralogical data for the rover operations. It lets one navigate through the scene and interact with the environment, such as viewing in-situ observations, feature measurement, and an animation of rover drives. The system is optimized based on a set of performance tests and user feedbacks.

Keywords

Mars; astronomy computing; virtual reality; MER mission; Mars; Mars exploration rover; Meridiani Planum; Santa Maria Crater; compositional data; dynamic visual representation; imaging data; interactive virtual 3D environment; mineralogical data; planetary science community; virtual astronaut; virtual reality study; Data models; Mars; NASA; Navigation; Random access memory; Three-dimensional displays; Virtual reality; Mars surface; Unity; data fusion; navigation; virtual astronaut;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Virtual Reality (VR), 2013 IEEE

Conference_Location

Lake Buena Vista, FL

ISSN

1087-8270

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-4795-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VR.2013.6549384

Filename

6549384